Long before a symposium was a dry, academic conference, it was an after-dinner party with a lot of wine. Plato’s Symposium, written around 360 BCE, imagines such a party, and it became the framework for Bernstein’s multi-movement work for solo violin and an orchestra of strings and percussion.
This violin concerto was likely premiered by Bologne with the Concert des Amateurs, and was published around 1775 by Antoine Bailleux. Look out for the sudden entry of peasant pipes and fiddles, crashing the elegant ambiance—a musical anticipation of the French Revolution to come.
Bach’s manuscript of the Solo Violin Sonatas and Partitas dates from 1720, during his time as Kapellmeister in Köthen, though their inception probably goes back to 1703, during his time in Weimar.
Ravel’s Violin Sonata No. 2 was a long time in the making, with the first ideas put down as early as 1922 and the premiere in 1927—all for about 17 minutes of music. He struggled with depression as his musical output slowed to a trickle.
Telemann published a periodical called “The Faithful Music Master,” filled with entertaining and instructive chamber music. Among the pieces was a set of violin duets inspired by a recent bestseller, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.
This is the first and less famous of Ravel’s two violin sonatas, published long after his death, in 1975.
Britten was motivated by pacifism in the face of war in Europe. His violin concerto is uneasy, with lyrical lines built on a dangerously unstable foundation.
Ravel’s Sonata for Violin and Cello is a tour-de-force, its thin instrumentation jacked up with blazing string crossings, piercing harmonics, and snapping pizzicatos.